“I am avidly following all the international goings on,” Julia McWilliams reported to her beau Paul Child on March 2, 1946. “I am particularly interested in the Russian game of imperialism…. To me the Russian business is the historical and crucial happening—in that, on its outcome depends the future of Europe, Asia, and us.” McWilliams’s comments were not those of an idle observer casually interested in geopolitical dynamics; during World War II she served, with high security clearance, in the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Over six feet tall, she was rejected by the WAVES, the women’s branch of the navy, but was accepted by the OSS in December 1942 to do clerical work in Washington, D. C. A year and a half later McWilliams was assigned to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she collected and processed highly classified information. After the war she returned to the United States but maintained a strong interest in world affairs. On March 5, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned that the Soviet Union, once allied with the United States and England during World War II, was lowering an “iron curtain” over Eastern Europe to suppress democracy and dominate the region. Joseph Stalin angrily denounced Churchill and insisted the Soviet Union had every right to “ensure its security” by encouraging pro-Soviet governments in neighboring countries. Writing to Paul Child on March 19, McWilliams was not, at least initially, entirely dismissive of this view.
Two very interesting letters from you—which I can at least answer in my leisure and beautific mood. I have recently and successfully made a most satisfactory, light, delectable bernaise sauce (awfully easy when the tricks are known), and have laboriously practiced on my piano….
I felt Stalin had quite a few points on his side in his speech. (I wonder how accurate or how “shaded” the translation was—is the meaning of “lie” retranslated into the original Russian that Stalin used, as rude a word in Russian as it is in English—etc., etc.) For one thing, I am inclined to forget that Russia was almost beaten to the knees by the German advances into Stalingrad, and that they lost an in-numerable amount of people—far more than we did. Why, also, is it not quite rational for them to want pro-Russian governments in their adjoining territories? His point seems well taken, indeed about our toleration and support of former fascists in government posts rather than Communists. Our position seems to have been so often “anything but the Communists”—which is such a negative and disastrous position = viz: Spain from 1933 on.
I notice so much of your “obfuscation” in people’s thinking—or rather their un-thinking mind-patterns which have been conditioned and channelled by bewilderment, fear, and the loud-blabbing propaganda pressure groups. RUSSIA, as a word, is a symbol for FEAR. Ain’t it? …
McWilliams later condemned the Soviets after the brutality of Stalin’s regime was exposed, but she remained troubled by anti-Communist hysteria in the United States in the years after World War II. The “loud-blabbing propaganda” she alluded to in 1946 found, in her belief, its mouthpiece in a little-known senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [names],” McCarthy declared on February 9, 1950, “a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” Challenged to substantiate the charges, McCarthy refused. He later said he had only eighty-one names. Or possibly fifty-seven; he wasn’t certain. Living with her now-husband Paul in France, where she was studying cooking, Julia Child followed McCarthy’s rise to power from international newspapers and through letters from friends and family in the United States. In March 1954 Child learned that an ad hoc committee established by Smith College alumnae had succumbed to McCarthyism as well. Child, who graduated from Smith in 1934, was livid. On March 12 she fired off the following:
Mrs. Aloise B. Heath, Secretary Committee for Discrimination in Giving
My dear Mrs. Heath:
Another fellow alumna of Smith College has forwarded to me a copy of an undated form letter containing your printed signature as secretary of a committee whose members are unidentified. This letter names five members of the Smith College faculty as having been or as now being associated with organizations cited as Communist dominated or as Communist fronts, etc. I have also a memorandum, dated February 26, 1954, signed by the President of Smith College and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Smith College, stating that your committee never presented its letter either to the President or to the Board of Trustees for comment or investigation.
I know you feel you are doing your patriotic duty towards Smith College and towards the United States, or you would not have allowed your name to be used at the end of your committee’s letter. But I respectfully suggest that you are doing both your college and your country a dis-service.
We, as alumnae, have voted, in the correct parliamentary fashion, for each member of the Board of Trustees to act in our behalf. Our trustees, who are answerable to us, have duly selected President Wright to administer the college. It is an extremely serious matter to accuse by implication five faculty members of being traitors to the United States; and furthermore to accuse the college of knowingly harboring these “traitors”. According to proper democratic methods, charges of this grave nature should first be brought to the attention of the President and the Trustees. You have assumed a responsibility for which you were not appointed. It is clear that you do not trust your own elected officers, and that you do not have confidence in democratic procedures.
David Lawrence, the newspaper columnist, has an article in today’s Herald Tribune in which he states again a principle he has stated before in regard to fighting Communism: “The followers of Senator McCarthy believe in fighting fire with fire, and they are not too concerned with the methods, etc.” This is the theory of the “end justifying the means.” This is the method of the totalitarian governments. It makes no difference how you do it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, but use any method fair or foul as long as you reach your goal. I am sure Lawrence has not thought through his thesis to this length, but carried to its logical conclusion, it is the nullification of all that the United States stands for. In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States.
In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and our freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for. Certainly democratic procedures are often slow. But their very slowness gives full opportunity for free debate, free investigation, the right of the accuser to present his case, and the right of the defendant to hear the charges and be faced with the evidence. None of these rights are available in the totalitarian countries; nor have you made them available to the persons you have accused.
One of the purposes of Smith College, and the main reason why its alumnae support it, is that it is a free, democratic institution, privately endowed, and subject to no political pressures from any government or any party. It can operate freely as long as its Trustees and its President have the courage to act as they see fit, with the support of the alumnae. In this very dangerous period of our history where, through fear and confusion, we are assailed continually by conflicting opinions and strong appeals to the emotions, it is imperative that our young people learn to sift truth from half-truth; demagoguery from democracy; totalitarianism in any form, from liberty. The duty of Smith College is, as I see it, to give her daughters the kind of education which will ensure that they will use their minds clearly and wisely, so that they will be able to conduct themselves as courageous and informed citizens of the United States.
I am sending to Smith College in this same mail, along with a copy of this letter, a check to duplicate my annual contribution to the Alumnae Fund. I am confident that our Trustees and our President know what they are doing. They are only too well aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, as it is always the great institutions of learning that are attacked first in any police state. For the colleges harbor the “dangerous” people, the people who know how to think, whose minds are free.
Very sincerely yours,
Julia McWilliams Child
That same March the esteemed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow broadcast a withering profile on McCarthy, and senators from McCarthy’s own party began to criticize him publicly. The backlash had begun. When McCarthy assailed the U.S. Army for harboring spies and Communists, the military refused to be bullied. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” the army’s chief counsel Joseph Welch reproached McCarthy on June 9, 1954, before a televised audience of millions. On December 2 the Senate voted by a three-to-one margin to condemn McCarthy for his behavior. He died two and a half years later of acute alcoholism.